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Google Ngram of the Arctic

Google Ngram is a nifty tool that’s part of Google Books. It allows you to search any keyword going back hundreds of years in time across multiple “corpuses,” which are essentially millions of texts that Google has digitized in various languages. Essentially, Google Ngram can be perceived of as a way of quantifying culture. Running the word “Arctic” through Google Ngram across these four corpuses reveals widely divergent trends, which we can generalize to represent changes in the Arctic’s cultural prominence in four countries: the UK, USA, China, and Russia.

In the chart above, the corpuses are as follows:

eng_gb_2012: British English

eng_us_2012: American English

chi_sim_2012 : Simplified Chinese

rus_2012: Russian

In the UK, the Arctic reached its cultural apex at the end of the 1870s as fervor about polar exploration spread. The English press reported back on all of the expeditions going on at the time, such as the British Arctic Expedition, which from 1875-1876 tried and failed to reach the North Pole. Interest in the Arctic then declined sharply right before 1900. It rose again from the 1940s through 1960s, when the Cold War turned the Arctic into a frozen battleground. The late 1990s, during which climate change became an issue of international concern, also saw the word “Arctic” mentioned more frequently – only for it to surprisingly drop off sharply in the early 2000s.
In the US, as in Britain, usage of the word also rose in the 1870s and 1880s. In 1870, the US Congress bankrolled the Polaris expedition led by Charles Francis Hall, who sought to reach the North Pole after two previous Arctic expeditions. Mention of the word “Arctic” leveled off in American English until World War II. From 1941-1945, so-called Arctic convoys began sailing with critical goods and supplies from ports in the US, UK, and Iceland to northwest Russia as part of the Lend-Lease program. The Arctic continued to be mentioned in the US (and UK) during the first few decades of the Cold War, while it decreased in frequency in the Russian corpus – possibly suggesting that the US and UK were more fixated on the region as a potential battlefield than the Red Army.